During my first years at the NYT, there was Johnny Apple, & slightly later, David Carr. Both said & did wtf they wanted. They were emo & florid & funny & annoying. Apple once lied that he KILLED Viet Cong during the war. Journalism used to be way MORE emotional than it is now.

If you were trying hard to color within the lines as a Junior person, you were often encouraged to take more risks—and you have the model of Carr & Apple to know that’s where we’d end up. With freedom & the NYT having our backs.

Here’s what I think happened: after Howell Raines, Jayson Blair & Gerald Boyd were fired in an absurd & arguably racist bloodbath, most junior people got really, really scared.

Bill Keller used to get irritated with me from time to time—for saying “chills”? NO. Anytime he thought I was *losing my voice*, becoming “too Timesian.”

Most of us, esp women/POC, didn’t get anything like the leeway that say Carr got. Jayson Blair’s addiction wasn’t factored into his issues as a journalist. But Carr’s addictions (& recoveries) were his calling card. Like Apple’s excesses. They made him roguish & an idol.

But if you weren’t among the white hard-living rogue dudes you had to be very very very careful. I got pummeled by an editor once for writing that Ron Paul took money from Stormfront (when it was a personal check from Stormfront’s leader) because that suggested liberal bias.

But as usual, the paradox: the smaller you try to make yourself, the more your slips into personality or emotion stand out & get penalized.

If you’re approximating self-erasure, why can’t you go all the way?!?

So this week an excellent editorialist makes a joke abt Pence that would have been laughably tame to Johnny Apple & a brilliant reporter says she got chills, & the NYT convulses with status anxiety.

Does ANYTHING think this will make the right will stop slagging off the NYT?

No. Everyone is just made more timid and cowed.

And because media outlets that should have more confidence fall in thrall to the right, the right keeps the whip hand.

No one is free to write, report, enliven the discourse, & add to the sum total of human knowledge.